Belle, Interrupted
by whatifqueen
Summary: Storybrooke General Hospital, psychiatric ward. The room of the unknown woman.


**Summary: **Storybrooke General Hospital, psychiatric ward. The room of the unknown woman.

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**Belle, Interrupted**

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The drugs have gotten progressively stronger since she first came here.

Her treatment hasn't been going well, apparently; it hasn't for a long time. Not that anyone will tell her what that means. Or even what's wrong with her. Instead, she exists in a state of perpetual limbo inside a gray box with padded walls where the only thing of color is a plastic mattress closer to black than blue. It's difficult to tell. The only source of light is a window, and even that is a pale and watery thing.

It's barred, of course; all the windows are barred here. Sometimes, if she looks through it from just the right angle while standing on top of her mattress, she can almost see something out of it that's not white hallways; something that could almost be the outside. Most of the time she's too lethargic do anything more taxing than sit up, though. If she's being honest, even thinking is a little too much for her to handle some days.

That's when the nurses strike.

They ask her questions about things she only half-remembers, things she finds herself answering before she can help herself. Their voices are always carefully modulated to give the impression of being soothing, but she's been there too long to believe them.

Sometimes, late at night, she'll reach down to trace the marks she'd made on the block rising up out of the ground to support her mattress: One for each day; just the faintest of impressions made by fingernails, nothing that the orderlies would notice in the daylight, but enough for her to feel in the dark. And what she'd felt…

The number they added up to was impossible. She must have gotten confused at some point, made marks for days she'd marked previous or imagined it in the dark, or even unknowingly counted the marks some other poor soul had made; because if it was right, then she would have been here for decades. And she's caught her reflection in the window enough to know that's not true.

The nights are a breeding ground for self-doubt and fear, but the days are almost worse. The days bring the nurses and the orderlies, but they also bring hope – hope that someone might see her, visit her, bring meaning to a meaningless existence. There's a front desk. People must visit, they _must. _So why isn't there ever anyone for her?

Once, in a pique of rebellion, she thinks to slip a note through her food slot to one of the patients allowed a modicum of freedom in performing simply janitorial duties in their corridor. According to the rules, patients aren't supposed to talk to each other; a rule that would normally be ignored, if not for the fact that the nurse's station was right around the corner. A note, she finds, gets around the issue of carrying voices quite nicely.

It's simple enough: Toilet paper is a kind of paper, after all; and, while slightly unsanitary, a mashed-up slurry of food can be used to scrawl a message on it. In truth, she's rather proud of herself for thinking it up.

She means to ask for information on herself – her diagnosis, family members, her date of entry, the doctor who committed her; anything that might be useful – only… There's a problem when she goes to write it down. A very significant problem: She can't remember her name.

It's such a small thing, a name; small and inconsequential. How often does anyone think of themselves by their own name? Why would she have any need to when she's always with herself? And yet it was always there to call on should she ever need it. Or it should have been.

This isn't right. People aren't supposed to be locked away from any who might call them by that name, drugged to the gills until they can't even recall what it is anymore. No, there is something wrong with this place, and for the first time since she came here – was committed? – she's aware of what it truly is: No one is here to get better. They're here to be kept out of the way.

And it's working beautifully. There's nothing to be done from behind a cell door that almost never opens, staring into the gaping maw of an eternity consisting of such routine repetition that any hope of taking advantage of a slip-up is almost nil.

She's a prisoner and as such can't help herself, not really, not to unbar the door and walk out freely. The only ones who can help her are on the outside: family or mental health advocates, or even unscrupulous lawyers looking to make a fast buck and a name for themselves. But she can find out.

And so she writes: _Has anyone ever visited the woman in room 3?_

After that, she waits. When the tell-tale sound of a mop squishing sudsy water along the concrete floor nears her room, she pushes open the food slot to peer out. "Hey," she whispers hurriedly. "Over here."

The patient looks up slowly from the spot he had been concentrating on. Stretching her arm through the slot at an odd angle, she can almost reach him. Almost. Even that is too much for her and the limp paper slips from her grasp. A small cry escapes her lips as she sees him gaze sadly at her note as it flutters to the floor.

"Please," she begs, knowing that she's risking discovery with every word. It doesn't matter – this could be her only chance. "I need your help."

The man keeps on mopping.

The head nurse finds the note, of course. That's when they take away her hairbrush, ostensibly because her recent behavior indicates that she's a danger to others. Either that or at risk for suicide; they're never really clear on that. When she asks, they take away her bedclothes, too.

Curling inward on herself, she huddles up close to the window to take advantage of that small bit of remaining warmth. True warmth, and not the burning sensation under the skin that the newest batch of pills makes her feel.

"Good," she's told when she mentions it. "That means they're working."

It's not giving up, she tells herself as she finds herself giving in to sleep more and more often, but a strategic retreat. It just happens to include retreating into her mind. Dreams are her last refuge in this place, and even then they're not particularly comforting. Or at least they shouldn't be.

Dreams of falling off ladders, of strangely high-pitched laughter, of wandering a forest path by herself; things that shouldn't inspire feelings of excitement or burgeoning hope that fade all too quickly upon awakening. The sad truth is that reality has never felt so real, and that worries her. But she's just so tired…

A noise at the door changes that, echoing in the silence as metal clangs against metal. It takes her a while, but she finds that she has the strength to turn her head to look. And while she's seen nurses and orderlies peer through the slot before, this woman is new. Too made up, too accessorized, too…modern.

Too knowledgeable. Not a word is spoken between them, the woman's red lips simply quirked upward in a smirk as she stares, but in that instant she'd bet her life on it: _That woman knows who she is_. And then the woman is gone as quickly as she came, as if she was never there to begin with.

The next time the slot opens is for her daily allotment of medication. Only this time she hides them under her tongue instead of swallowing. They make a soft plink-plink as she spits them out into the toilet once she's alone. The sound of flushing has never been more satisfying.


End file.
